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FileZilla is one of the best FTP clients ever, however while they’re perfect everybody else isn’t

What this means is that if an FTP site isn’t configured correctly then trying to download files that have special characters or accents in them using the FileZilla client will fail, the FileZilla team don’t want to support it because they’re doing the correct thing standards wise (UTF-8 settings on the server) and it’s other people’s failings that are causing the problem but other clients DO support this kind of behaviour eg. firefox which is a shame…

This means that we do need to find a way around the problem with FileZilla, the first sign that something has gone wrong will be in your failed downloads tab

A quick glance at the file usually shows you that there is a special character or accent in it, in this case a “À”

To get round this I found easiest way is merely to select all of the items that have failed right click and export them

This will give you an XML file, open it up and look for the “File” sections and then find and replace the special charaters in the “localFile” section to a none special charater, save the file then import it into fileZilla (file —> Import), you will find that it will download all missing files.

It would be nice if there was an automated version of this but as far as I can tell the FileZilla guys are sticking to standards. :(

This is a social review post done when I should be doing technical posts but I REALLY enjoy this YouTube channel and as this particular YouTuber is moving to running his channel full time it seemed like a good opportunity to do a review.

The channel is called @ChristopherOdd and it’s a ‘let’s play’ channel or ‘long play’ as I used to know them, in which someone plays full video games while narrating what they are doing, there are hundreds of them out there so what differentiates this one from others?

Christopher Odds voice: His voice is far more like an audio book narrator than a gamer, he doesn’t get hysterical, he doesn’t make you wince, he doesn’t get over excited in a fake way (though he suffers baddly from jump scares in horror games) it’s a pleasant dulcet tone to listen too, as someone that listens to a huge number of audio books I’ve come to really appreciate the quality of a narrator and as far as I’m concerned Christopher Odd is the best narrator for games that I have currently met on any platform.

Mental speed: I don’t know his age and I haven’t looked into it (it feels a bit stalkerish to start looking at peoples age and things like that) but he’s about my mental speed, he solves problems at about the speed I do, I don’t want to jump up and down and yell for him to do things faster or slower, he just thinks at a nice pace and I feel after he has completed the game that I have seen all of that game and that it is as complete a play through as I would make.

Being correct without being too correct: Christopher is constantly correcting himself while he’s playing, you can see from one video to another that he is learning and changing his opinions as things grow and change, Cultural slips are corrected, things said in the heat of the moment are amended instantly and this is at a time when his popularity is at about 300000 YouTube followers when a lot of YouTubers think they can get away with saying offensive things without any backlash. It makes you think he is a good person in real life.

These and the choices of the games he plays result in a channel I can watch all day, a rarity in this day and age :)

But even if he is a joy to listen too, why would I want to watch a video of someone playing computer games? for me there are two reasons

He plays a series of games that I would never play!! I do not want to play Dark Souls, all the Dark Souls series are massively frustrating to play and that’s not something I am interesting in experiencing but I am fascinated with their worlds and want to learn about them 1.

He plays most of his games based on their story and that story is often better than a lot of TV series. To me watching him play is it enjoyable as a series, in fact more so because I can predict most elements of a TV story line (As can most people) but when watching a game there will be surprise elements based purely on his game play over and above the story, the same cannot be said of TV.

All this has meant that I am now a Patron supporter of his channel and treat the news of him going full time with great delight, his channel is by far the one I watch the most and at the current quality I see no reason to change that in the future. :)

After watching the play through I now feel invested in the game and From Software actually get money out of me when they normally wouldn’t as I have bought Dark Souls books and merchandise. ↩

This is an old tip that I never thought I would use again but has come back to life with the advent of the cloud:

Scenario:

We are migrating multiple servers from onsite to the cloud, the bandwidth of this copy means that it won’t happen within 24 hours and it definitely won’t happen within the maintenance window we have, normally with Lotus Notes migrations from one server to another this wouldn’t be an issue as Domino replication has been a model of stability and ease of use for well over 10 years HOWEVER there are tons and I do mean tons of complex replication settings in this clients setup a lot of them unknown or unremembered to the client, so they have found that using replication means they will miss some of these and after having a look at them I tend to agree so file copy it is..

NSF files tend to be a bit bulky and zip up really rather well so zipping them up before moving them over them makes sense but we don’t want to do one large zip, because 1) The target file system doesn’t have a lot of extra space on it, and 2) The actual copy will take several days so we want to do it one chunk at a time

First let’s get a list of all of the NSF’s files we want to copy over, this will have a double advantage of giving us an indication of numbers and size etc as well as giving us something that we can actually work through so that we can do one group at a time,

dir *.nsf /s /b>f:\filelist.txt

Once we have the list then the following little script popped in a batch file and with WinRAR installed on the system will give you an exact mimic of your notes folder structure but with each NSF zipped up and in the correct place

You can then copy them over in whatever method you prefer and unzip as suits you, this method may seem a little Noddy but this is the third time I’ve used it and every time the notes movement has been the easiest part of a migration.